On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 03:23:28PM -0700, tbot55@yahoo.com wrote:
> Why use Geronimo?
That's the $64,000 question. At this point Geronimo is more "raw"
than its commercial and open-source alternatives, so part of deciding
to use Geronimo is being willing to deal with a few cuts and bruises.
Pretty much any J2EE feature can be made to work, but it will require
more effort (and maybe some time perusing the code) than it would with
one of Geronimo's alternatives. But that's to be expected with *any*
pre-1.0 product. Or in the commercial world, any pre-3.0 product.
So what's the upside? For me there are a couple of things, for other
people I'm sure there are more. First, the Apache license is more
permissive than the GPL so if you work for a company that distributes
software your lawyers will prefer Geronimo to a GPL or LGPL product.
If you're using it in-house then this is less important.
YMMV but I find Geronimo interesting because it's so raw. Because
there's no spiffy GUI configurator I end up spending more effort but
learning how Geronimo works, not just how to turn a few knobs to make
it do something. This often requires some work on evenings and
weekends since I don't expect my employer to indulge my curiosity, but
for me it's worth it.
On a more touchy-feely level, I've found the Geronimo community to be
very easy and pleasant to work with. They want to teach people "how
to fish" with Geronimo. They're cooperative and patient. This is
good because you'll probably need their help to get a non-trivial J2EE
application running in Geronimo.
So if you're looking to roll down the fall-line I'd recommend one of
Geronimo's alternatives. If you've got some time and some curiosity
then Geronimo is for you.
Good luck,
Toby